This Week in Native: Measuring Attention With Nudge And The 2015 Internet Trends Report Is In

Every week, we feature four articles about native advertising, one piece of brand content and an interesting industry stat.

This week in native...

Facebook Instant Articles sound amazing and horrifying for publishers, but what about for brands? See how Nudge and Sharethrough are bringing attention metrics to your sponsored content campaigns, plus the fortune teller of the Internet, Mary Meeker, has some must-see trends for 2015.

With much ado, Facebook's Instant Articles were warmly received at launch and now industry experts are weighing in on on how Instant articles could shake things up now that it's here. On one end, some fear that this is Facebook's initial step to owning the news — and its audience. On the other end, many publishers know that Facebook is still only one of a "portfolio" of distribution outlets.

While this feature is only for publishers, brands may be more encouraged than ever to partner with publishers for sponsored content campaigns and could foreshadow of a future product for brands to directly host (and post) articles on Facebook.

Measuring content marketing and native advertising is different from your online marketing. It isn't about bounce rates, site visits or page views. It is about how much time users spend with your content and whether or not they are engaged. Sharethrough works with Nudge to provide attention metrics, the metrics that matter for sponsored content.

Every year, like the groundhog's shadow, the world awaits Mary Meeker's Internet Trends. This year is no different with nearly 200 pages of data and insights on key Internet trends and predictions to understand, follow and capitalize on.

One of my favorites is vertical video: 29% of our time is spent on vertical screens and 71% on horizontal screens. This leads to full-screen video ads on Snapchat having a 9x higher completion rate when they are vertical versus horizontal. In a mobile-first world, vertical videos are taking over.

Brands are serious about viewability and verifying that their ads are seen, even if you're YouTube or Facebook. Kellogg's recently stopped buying YouTube ads because they weren't able to use third party verification services to check viewability rates.

For publishers big and small, this demonstrates an increased need to support advertiser needs and ensure ads are not only viewable, but also verified. For brands, this continues their fight to pay for ads that are actually seen.

PulsePoint conducted research on native advertising and content marketing. They found that 67% of marketers use content marketing to support brand engagement and spend is expected to increase 45% over the next two years.